Where's The Love,&nbspDMOZ?

There was once a directory called DMOZ, which shone forth like a beacon of glorious link-light. From all across the realm, downtrodden webmasters would travel to pay homage to the ones called Editors, that those keepers of the Categories might bequeath a link of great PageRank upon them. Woe upon those who did not have the light of the most open directory, as their websites would surely wither and perish.

Sadly, that's not far from the way many people saw DMOZ in the past, and that attitude still persists in 2011. It's easy to understand why – a free yet authoritative directory that even now has a Toolbar PR of 8 is certainly an attractive link target. Unfortunately, when we quest after high authority mega-directories, we sometimes miss that the SEO and traffic value of the link we can actually get (one buried deep in subcategories) is virtually non-existent.

Where Are The Pages?

This post came out of Q&A, where we've had multiple questions about new DMOZ links not showing up in Open Site Explorer. To be honest, the timing and depth of these links means that OSE doesn't always catch them, but in almost every case that I dug into, the DMOZ pages in question weren't being indexed by Google, either.

In many cases, these links end up in one of the Regional categories. Let's look at an example, the DMOZ regional listing for website developers in Denver. The URL is a bit too long to display here, but it's 11 folders deep (10 below the root).

Although Google shows a cached copy, there's nothing in the index. Even the cached copy is over 2-1/2 months old. Unfortunately, no indexation means no link-juice gets passed.

Where Did It Go Wrong?

I'm not here just to pick on DMOZ – I want to illustrate how, as you dive deep into a site (even a very high-authority site), it's easy to lose link-juice fast. Let's pick apart that DMOZ link, level by level. The following table shows whether each level is indexed by Google and OSE, as well as the Toolbar PR and SEOmoz PA scores for the page:

I should point out that these listing pages are hardly unloved orphans, in the scheme of DMOZ. The Denver Business_and_Economy page lists 1,017 companies, and even the deepest Web_Design_and_Development level has 35 listings. Keep in mind that these are also web developers, who are probably eager to see their listing count for something.

Can You Save The Love?

There are cases where enterprising SEOs may find it worth their while to get someone else's page indexed. You could build your own links to the deep DMOZ listing page, promote it in social media, etc., nudging the crawlers to take action. In this case, though, you really have to ask if it's worth the trouble. The final resting place of this link is, unfortunately, just that – a link-juice graveyard. You could give it link-juice by linking to it, of course, but that effort is probably better spent on building your own, direct links.

Is There Someone for Me?

There are plenty of fish in the sea, even without DMOZ, right? Let's look at another revered PR8 directory and coveted link source, the Yahoo Directory. Surely, the Yahoo regional listing for web developers in Denver must be loved by Google?

That's right – that subcategory page is not indexed in Google or OSE, and it has no TBPR or PA, even though it contains 27 active (and presumably bought and paid for) listings.

Does this mean big directories are a thing of the past? No, but it does mean that your infatuation may be more shallow than you think. There's a lot more to the value of a link than the TBPR or authority of the domain, and, if you're not careful, you might just find that your love is unrequited.

Update (February 10th): Despite my effort to nofollow the link, Google decided to mess with me (thanks for the heads up, Aaron B.) and index that DMOZ page, which now has a 2/10/11 cache date. I'm sure there's a lesson in here somewhere, but I refuse to learn it. It does suggest that even a nofollowed link and a few clickthroughs can kick the crawlers into gear.

Thank you for exposing DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory for the black holes that they are! My strategy with DMOZ has long been to "submit it and forget it", but it's incredible to me that Yahoo! can justify charging people so much for a link that won't be indexed in a directory that virtually no one has used since the late 1990's. BotW is another one that historically we have used quite a bit, so I applied your methodology out of curiousity and documented what I found for a common path within our niche:

Although the directories are very hierarchical, every once in a while the actual internal link paths don't mimic the URL structure. I suspect that the PA shifts reflect that somehow. Of course, it's also possible that someone built inbound links to a category. It's definitely interesting to watch how these metrics fall with depth, though.

I'm not sure many of you realize how dead DMOZ really is. Check out this search query. After removing the search string for editors, indexed DMOZ search queries, and automatically generated "suggest" pages, there have been 212 pages updated in the last month - most of them foreign (non-US/UK) pages. That's really terrible for a place with thousands of categories. Throw a keyword in the query, and you'll probably see that nothing even remotely related to your keyword has been updated in a month.

Google and SEOs are the only people who don't understand the fact that SEOs and site owners are the only people visiting DMOZ. Think of it from a user perspective - why would you ever use DMOZ? In the age of search engines it's almost entirely worthless.

I think you hit it on the head here.DMOZ was authoritative many years ago.It is no longer.End of story.It is old, outdated technology that is still just sitting around.Why would anyone use DMOZ to find something?Have you ever actually tried to drill down through the directory to find something. It is painful. The UI and the results are ridiculously archaic.Many years ago when there was nothing else, this was great but in today's time, there are much better options for finding information.

I would bet that 99% of my clients don't even know what dmoz is and have never heard of it.

Yes I still submit my sites and hope they get listed, but I do not fret if they are not. It only takes a few minutes for the submission.

From a user experience, the site is almost useless in today's time. Hopefully Google, being as user centric as they continually promote themselves, will note this and continue to diminish the value of the site.

Interesting, thanks. I actually ran into some oddities on DMOZ, as well, where pages were cached but didn't appear in the index. I ran that by the team, and that was a first for many of us. I frequently have issues with "site:" at the broad level, but almost never on a single page.

Searching by exact TITLE, it appears that the Yahoo directory page has a duplicate. I also found massive duplicate content filtering in play on DMOZ. I didn't want to complicate the story with that issue, but I suspect some of these pages are being filtered out.

Strictly from a link building standpoint I think a lot of people have adopted the strategy of "submit it, and forget it." If you get added great, but as this article proves, it may not make a difference. I think I have seen 2 hits from DMOZ all of last year. That number I would imagine is a lot more then what most people get these days.

I think the love stopped when DMOZ tookmonths and months to accept new websites. Sure I had a few websites over the years added but I think the days of people thinking DMOZ is the bed all end all of link building are over. Good analysis on DMOZ but =)

As others said below, I tend to take a fire-and-forget approach. Submit a listing, sure, but then let it go and check back in 2 months if you want to. I think the broader lesson is that not all links are created equal, and deep pages are an elusive critter.

and to further your point as I understand it, while there is obviously an issue of a bottleneck in terms of getting new listings added to DMOZ, due to the massive PageRank dilution that is going on there the value of even obtaining such a link is questionable at best. As for yahoo, I can only wonder how many have paid and continue to pay the $299 listing fee for a link which passes little to no link juice?

It used to take about 2 years for an average, low-level category to be looked at. An editor receiving permissions for a new category, back in 2006-2007, would find submissions as old as 2 1/2 years, generally.

Now, an editor getting new permissions will find much older submissions, between 5-6 years. That means that at this moment, most categories have not been looked at in over half a decade. That's how infrequently sites are added. Very few listings are of websites crated after 2007 for this reason.

As you guys know that sometimes it becomes of impossible to get Dmoz approval, so all of you guys can get Dmoz backlink :0)

Purchase an old domain (which was already submitted in the Dmoz) you can find dmoz listed domains from digital point forum by filtering the results, after that just put 301 redirect on that domain pointing toward your website.

Wow, DMOZ. I haven't even thought about that place in about a year.
I'm with you Dr. Pete on the fire and forget forget front. I'll submit a site and completely forget about it, until i read about something that reminds me of it. Speaking of which I wonder if that site I submitted last year got in yet?
But as far as a traffic standpoint I don't know anyone that uses a directory to find anything. When you hear people ask each other where to find a good car dealership or a moving company no one answers "Check out DMOZ they have a ton of great sites listed." Everyone just says "Google it." So it would seem the directories days have passed us by.
UPDATE: Just went to go check and no they haven't been accepted. As best I can remember I submitted 3 URL's over a year ago. Seriously where is the love?

I am an editor at DMOZ. Really a fun activity for me and I am able to help other companies in my niche by listing them. It also provides some networking opportunities. Any lack of response folks are seeing to submittals, I believe, can be attributed to high workload or lack of editor for the given category. To give some perspective...my cat when I took it on had submissions from several years past that I had to work through. I am talking sites that when I would check the url I would expect them to be out of business (404, Domain available, and so on). That said what I see at DMOZ are lots of good people that enjoy the editing process.

My hope is that DMOZ will stay relevant and that there will continue to be a place for directories on the internet. For now I will keep on editing when I can and enjoy it.

Thanks for sharing your perspective and being brave enough to comment on the post. For a moment, I thought you meant your actual cat, though, and not your category ;)

Good point about the back-log - if you take on a category that's been dead for months (or years), that's got to be a nightmare. Plus, from even my experiences with YOUmoz here, I can imagine that DMOZ gets a mountain of spam.

I remember posting a comment here on SEOmoz about this... I ran into the same problem with BOTW directory: I paid for a listing, but my website is so deep in their link architecture that the category page on which it can be found is not even indexed.

I even tried to do small linkbuilding activities in order to fix this issue: Building a few links to the category page would help me to achieve some indexation, and then get some link love for my website, since, well... I PAID for it! Even this didn't help... It seems that the cause of this is exactly what you mention: Past a certain point (X number of indexed pages, based on Google algorithm, I'm not sure), even big directories run into indexation issues...

That's really interesting - although building links to a listing can certainly kick Google into gear, I really doubt it's worth it, in most cases. Why not build those links directly to your own site? That would be an interesting experiment, but it's really tough to tell how a handful of links impact a site with a solid profile.

I suspect there are some strong duplicate-content filtering issues at play here as well, but didn't want to complicate the issue too much with that.

Gee guys. Really hard to find a post when all we have to go on is "wrote yesterday". Voyeurs need links or at least a hint about where to look. :-) Any post Dr. Pete is reading is one I wanted to click on. (That's why I love CommentLuv Premium - because any post that good would be offered.)

Sorry, that was actually a technical consideration, not a link-hoarding issue. I was concerned that, if I passed an SEOmoz link, it would potentially bump those pages into action and completely change the dynamic I was exploring for someone who found the article a few weeks down the road. Honestly, I was a bit torn on which way to go with that.

What's worse than not being listed in DMOZ? Being listed and then removed. Why? Maybe because my site got ranked no. 1 on Google on its niche. Coincidence? Or maybe the editor must have seen my site ranking and being a competitor, tried to take my site down by delisting it in DMOZ. Can't prove it though.

Not only do all of the pages not get indexed, but it is hard enough to get listed! I have submitted clients' companies multiple times, but to no avail. The companies that I am submitting are legit, and they do not already have a listing, making the lack of responsiveness very frustrating.

I've seen comments from moderators before that indicate that resubmitting is the fastest way to a rejection since it indicates that you didn't read the directions to only submit the site once. (Not accusing, seriously, who here knew there were directions or would know where to find them?) Additionally, those same moderators indicated that resubmitting has the effect of getting kicked out of line to go to the back, soup nazi style. Any forward progress your submission might have made is lost.

I am an editor at DMOZ, of a very niche category. I try to put things in but not much pops up in my section so I am bored. When I request to moderate busier category I get declined. I rarely ever log in anymore.

I ran into that even a few years back. I was sincerely trying to become an editor in what I thought was a niche. I've never really understood the politics over there. I should say, though, that I'm not really trying to bash DMOZ and especially not volunteer editors - just the mystique webmasters give them.

I find the best way to get sites in is to become an editor. I used to be one in 1999 and had over 10,000 edits (I think) until I lost interest and as I was the editor of the entire Regional/US, they kicked me out! I was also sued over some of my editing from an angry competitor and Netscape gave me a pro-bono laywer to defend myself.... Ahh, that was fun. But I think I understand the logic of how they accept editors, so maybe that is a plus?

That said, I've applied two or three times to become an editor of small niche categories to get sites in. I am always accepted. Of course, I do it from email addresses with a specific persona, and craft an extensive history of why I should be editing... I'm currently waiting on one application right now. Hoping my record isn't broken! Probably the wrong way to do it though :-) But when you have a client that wants in, and it's a good category (niche - but still indexed in Google), it's a good addition to the start of a campaign.

Also, JoeAnt is another one that in the higher categories has indexed pages. I'm not sure if you have to pay for it or not? That is another one that I had so much editing in from 10 years ago that I can submit sites into 8+ top levels.

I happen to know that JoeAnt is really dead. The only person that's left is the founder. He's still toiling, all alone.

Another popular directory I know hasn't had a post in its editor forum for over a year and a half.

Aside from the immense growth of the web, which is no longer within the reach of volunteerism, the downfall of directories could be predicted by the lowering of the value of links as a way to game search engines, and the very harsh trearment of entrylevel wannabes, and high barriers to "advancement."

The worse was DMOZ, beset with insitutionalized paranoia where several metas would spend nearly all their time on policing other volunteers, resulting in honest editors with literally hundreds of thousands of edits being booted out without warning or explanation for a single controversial website inclusion or for being too spunky in the internal fora.

Being a control freak will kill any good project. Waayyyyy back when I was still breeding horses I was an editor for that niche, but I did not log in for too long once and that was it. Since then I have applied because research is my favorite thing to do - research and then share the results.

If bloggers like me who have been working online since the beginning of the www and are known for quality and ethical practices are not "good enough" to be editors, who is it exactly that they want?

And it isn't just us. Who among us would turn down Dr Pete's expertise? Strangling your existing editors and refusing to allow anyone new in has made DMOZ a dinosaur when they could have built on their influence indefinitely.

They COULD turn it around IF they cleaned up their act. You can't have editors refusing to list the top sites because they're your competitors. I don't believe in competing over a limited pie - I believe in collaborating to make the pie bigger.

Small businesses who don't start understanding that are going to be toast as Google keeps favoring big brands. We all need to build powerful geo-targeted niche blogs with huge audiences because it is a lot easier to rank that site than every individual business that benefits from being active on it.

I applied to be a volunteer at Dmoz around 7-8 months ago and wasn't accepted despite efforts to follow all of their guidelines.

I thought maybe it was because I had sites pending in submission, but the sites pending (Email Marketing) were in a completely different category than the section I was applying to volunteer (Engineering). I just figured that there weren't many engineers jumping on Dmoz everyday and it could be a nice way to give back a little of my time every now and then.

They still haven't found a volunteer for that section. I wish Dmoz would inform users of what issues were present in their application so they could have a larger volunteer base :-/

As Petra wrote in her comment, I am not a big fan of DMOZ too, and probably because of all the websites I have signed in, just very few have been finally listed.

I still give it a shot, as the process to propose a website just take a couple of minutes, but I feel it is like shooting to a black target being blinfolded and in a night without Moon.

Therefore:

A site possibly will never be listed... maybe because the editor of the category he wants its site to be listed does not even exist anymore or simply he does not dedicate time to his commitment.

A site maybe is going to be listed but its link maybe is not going to indexed*, therefore adios link juice hopes

Meanwhile other luckiest site do not only take the big authority boost from a - IMHO - totally not used by real users directory (do you use it?), but also see it multiplied by all the DMOZ mirrors existing and so well indexed, and that nothing more they are than scraping link farms.

Yahoo! Directory is probably the same (with the bad taste that you have to pay to simply being considered), but it doesn't affect me too much, as it is a directory for english written websites, and the Italian and Spanish versions are since long time dead.

But the problem is general to all directories: apart very vertical ones, I don't see them having a great future, at least if they do not reinvent themselves. What happened to Business.com few months ago can be the future for many of them soon.

* anyway, before submitting a site, I always double check if the category page I want to see a website listed is regularly indexed and cached by Google.

My other suspicion about Yahoo Directory is that, like some of the international versions, the U.S. version is not long for this world after the Microsoft merger. There will be enough outcry to keep it around a while, but I'm not sure if Yahoo has the will or the resource to keep it running forever. I'd be hesitant to pay for a listing in 2011 - something I would've recommended to plenty of people in 2005.

It is pretty sad the state of affairs that DMOZ is in. I noticed that both my links are from pages claiming a PR of 4. I haven't used OSE to check but I would imagine that there is some link juice being passed. While, the links are ok I wouldn't ever take DMOZ as the end of a link building campaign.

I have another question on OSE though, that is I notice that the data sometime doesn't match up well with Googles. For example, I notice sites that have very high authority in OSE that have very low page rank in Google's toolbar. Alright, alright I know tool bar pr is janky to begin with but this data use to always line up pretty closely and now, more and more I notice differences. Do you guys feel OSE is still accurate with recent Google changes?

I had the exact same thoughts as you - the part you're missing, though, is that Yahoo! duplicates their directory in several countries, so your listing re-occurs on several different continents. This may only be for national-type listings, though, which would make sense - but I definitely noticed it for domains I've been working on that weren't regionally based.

Of course, it seems obvious that a) replications and b) sites hosted in other countries pass less value, but when the listing is replicated four to five times, I have decided to overstep my first decision to not submit my site and thus reap the benefits the Yahoo! Directory passes.

I have yet to evaluate these things for DMOZ, but I know they do similar, so it makes sense that a similar benefit that comes from other sites scraping this data would make getting indexed anywhere in either directory worth doing. And DMOZ, of course, is free - so submitting there goes without saying.

I ran into massive duplicate content issues on both directories. It's interesting, because often high-authority sites can get away with more of that, but both DMOZ and Yahoo Directory pages are getting filtered. You can only have so many thousands of nearly identical page TITLEs that are just lists of links before Google stops caring.

One SEOmoz team member actually had a situation where a DMOZ listing for a client's new website got scraped so much that it damaged their link profile and ranking. It was an isolated incident, so I didn't want to put it in the post and potentially give people bad information, but it's food for thought.

What I do know is that the day I started looking at the sites that I need to approve and disapprove, there are 3 buckets:

A) Sites that appear to be good "fits" and I'll aprove

B) Sites that are obviously "spam" and will get denied

C) Sites that border both. These are the tough ones that I rack my brain over and feel bad if I have to deny their submissions. Obviously, everyone who wants to get into the directory does it simply for their own needs. They're not trying to improve the directory per se, but they want the link juice the directory will give them AND it's FREE!

Plus, we're "volunteers" and so spending that time racking our brains over #3 to make sure we don't make a mistake to some nice folks like most of the people most likely here unfortunately doesn't take up the top part of our priority lists. There's a reason why people complain about state gov'ts and non-profits: there's nothing motivating the people within to do more than they could (in many cases). It's even worse for volunteers obviously.

Anyway, I'm not saying the complaints are not valid, but...

So, become an editor and see what I see...you might start to sympathize. ;)

I appreciate hearing from a couple of editors. I want to make it clear, too, that my intent wasn't to bash DMOZ so much as to get people out of the mindset of treating one specific type of link as the end-all-and-be-all. Not only is it effort poorly spent, but it tends to breed the mentality that creates all those spammy submissions in the first place.

I am not the biggest fan of DMOZ either. The last year I tried several times to add an url in the directory with a short, factual text - but never succeeded. Are there no editors any more? I understand that all new entries can't be edited within weeks - but months or more??

I have a friend who had to become the editor of the section he wanted a link in just to get that link, of course he wasn't hugely keen to add competitor's sites whether they had value for visitors or not...

Don't feel bad as you're in VERY good company. DMOZ has declined every high quality ethical blogger I know who ever bothers to apply. I wrote a post years ago that agrees with Dr. Pete's "submit and forget" strategy. Many sites have been pending for years and years and never get an answer. Resubmitting is prohibited so if you don't get approved there is no recourse.

When the web was smaller, a directory, that guaranteed quality like DMOZ had real value but now, with the sheer scale of the web, and the depth needed to categorise it then it has really lost it's place in the modern web.

Equally, that is reflected in the way google indexes depth. With people no longer caring about DMOZ, the deep, deep, deep links are of little value. Man, if you have a page that is already like 9 levels deep in the hierarcy and has over a hundred external links on it, really, what value can that really add?

DMOZ needs good leadership and a total rethink to become relevant again else it will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs.

Very to the point. there are no users going to this site and if they did they would never go past the home page. user behavior has changed across the board and hands down get very high wieghting in the new seo landscape. its not just links from directories driving rank anymore.

Lots of comments and interesting to not see any recommendations of good current directories. Would be great to see a regular uodated list that everyone can collaborate on. or can anyone make a recommendation on where to find one?

I don't think it's Google messing with you, it's that this site's RSS feed is probably scraped and republished more than any other in the SEO world. If you look at all the scrapers, you'll find plenty of followed links.

Sure thing. A quick note to some other comments about traffic coming in from a DMOZ listing. We do see traffic daily from our link in the dir though not large volumes of it. Also this traffic mainly comes from the Google directory. So a link does bring some traffic and a bit of page rank "juice" though it is perhaps not the holy grail of link building that it once was.

I have had sucess once with dMoz around a year and a half ago.I submited a website to a regional catergory and was accepted within one week. I visisted the catergory a few weeks back again to submit another website and noticed is has not be edited since my last link was approved.Everyone should just give up on dMoz. Its 2011!

So, I have this client with a new website and I finally got around to creating a Google profile for the site. Well, impatient person that I am, I didn't think it was getting indexed fast enough. So- maybe I gave it a couple of back-links. Maybe I used my top keyword for that back-link. Well, oops there it was, google.com/profiles/xxx... at #1 for a little while for the keyword search. At least now it has moved off that position, but doesn't that show something about domain authority. I had the same surprising result from a "free website" at Snap Pages of all places. It's like the Ezine Articles effect- some domains just fare better and your back-link is closer to home. I've been feeling this way about DMOZzzz too, that it's a feather in your cap, but maybe not much else.

Directory submissions used to be one of the best options of getting valuable back-links, but the internet has evolved way too far for us to be stuck to ancient dinosaurs. Dmoz, might not be dead yet. But the amount of labour spent can be better utilized elsewhere.

It still has authority, but personally, I do not think it's worth my time. Going into 201X, the engines would start de-valuing links from non-organic sources at a quicker pace in their attempt to give higher value to social signals.

I'm not sure about anyone else but it's been a long time since i've seen Google use the Open Directory site title rather than the sites actual title, was happening for us back in 2008 (didn't use the noodp tag as I actually quite liked it :) but haven't seen it for a good long while.

See, at least once, the small countries and languages have a benefit. I went to check the losing of PR, and see that if you go into Slovenian, the depth goes for example till the 5 or 6th level, that still has PR 5. So that is ok... A bit, I hope, because the site is listed in google, but not cached...

Well, I'll build a couple of links towards it, when I get my links approved :D

While all this may be true, the fact of the matter is that it's free and should you're link end up on an indexed page, it's a great win.

For the sake of setting aside 5 minutes to submit a site, I think it would be silly not to go for it!

I agree that DMOZ shouldn't be seen as a holy grail that will propel a site into the heavens, but it will still help greatly should your link be on an indexed page. I think with that in mind, the effect DMOZ will have on any given site is down to the niche the site is operating in, a bit of creative submitting...and luck!

The main point about DMOZ is - despite all the endless issues with how the system works, the lack of indexing in some areas, the amount of time it takes for a submission to appear, the high numbers of links on pages - you can't easily disregard the fact that it's the only way to get into the Google directory. Which, in my experience, is a lot more valuable a link to obtain.

DMOZ has always been a highly respected directory and one which I've used for many moons, but as of late I find that it takes months for links to appear on the site and in most cases they are incredibly deep. Combining those negative factors will have put a large number of people off, however, I have a rule.. you might not seen love immediately and you might not get all the juice you wanted, but there will be a little and who knows who'll stumble across the link when looking around DMOZ, so submit your link, it doesn't take that long.

Are you serious? You did a 'site:' command and concluded that, because Google didn't return those pages, that the big G doesn't index those pages?

Dude. You should know better than that. That is such an amateur error of judgment, I expected better from the Moz. You should know the site: command, like it's cousing the link: command, delivers incomplete information - at best. It's pretty darn unreliable as an indexation measure.

I've actually found the "site:" operator pretty reliable for single pages - it often fails and definitely estimates at the broad level, but it's good on the drill-down (much more reliable than "link:"). I did point out, though, that the DMOZ page was cached, so there was an inconsistency in the mix. I strongly suspect, digging in, that some of these pages are being filtered out due to duplication (or near-duplication combined with very low authority). I stand by the core argument, though - that deep in the site, these pages are virtual non-entities.

BTW, just to the community in general - I have no problem with being called out on technical issues. I'm hear to learn, too. I stand by the conclusions, but these issues are complex and, when you get into huge sites, things often don't work the way we assume they do.